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General battleground strategies
Note from the initial author: :I am not the best PvPer. I am not on a 2500+ rank Arena team, nor do I have a PvP title. I am a very frustrated Alliance player that wants to actually help the Alliance win more BGs. :It's no myth that the Horde generally do better in most BGs. Maybe it's because the Alliance go into BGs with the attitude that the Horde will win. Maybe the Horde listen to leaders better and follow the plan. Maybe the Alliance is simply full of idiots that like to run around soloing wave after wave of Horde-slaughter-machines. :I do not care why we lose so often, but I do care about doing my best to help us win more BGs. General strategies Golden rules No matter the BG, these rules should be adhered to to ensure maximum use of force. *Never travel alone. The more the merrier. *Always buff yourself and others if you can. *Always leave defense at the area you captured. *Let the team know where the enemy is strong and where it is weak. *Stay near healers. You help them, they help you. *Kill their healers. *Remain focused on the overall objective. *Report AFK players. If we fail to do anything about them, they will continue to earn their meager honor and be OK with wasting everyone's time. Before you begin There is a waiting period before each BG for a reason. This period is referred to as the "Buff Phase". If you are a buff class but you don't buff everyone you can, you are a part of the struggling Alliance cause. All buffs cost 0 mana. That warrior you failed to buff might not be able to save you when the time comes. Have a plan and stick to the plan. Listen to the BG leader. This may not actually be the player named "Battleground Leader". Usually one person will speak up with advice to help. Give them support, even if you think the idea is not the best, it's better to work together than spend a minute arguing. Plans can change on the fly. How to Avoid Turtling A turtle is a game where one or both sides offenses fail and their defense becomes so powerful that a stalemate ensues. These games can often drag on for more than an hour with both sides struggling to regain an offense. A turtle can be avoided by following a few simple rules. *Wait for GYs to capture before advancing. They take several minutes. *Don't travel alone. *Resist the urge to run all the way to the Horde General unless the entire offense has decided to skip graveyards (risky). *Dying early causes you to respawn so far from offense that you are stuck on defense. Path to Victory Some general tips to bring focus to the battleground and quickly give your team the edge. *Communication is absolutely critical, and often why a pick up group will lose to a premade group, usually a guild. The guild will often be on vent and can quickly and efficiently communicate, while you cannot. But even the barest hint of information can help focus your team's strategy. e.g. If you are a small group of 3 alliance guarding a flag, typing "inc 6 horde" can alert your teammates to rush to your defense or abandon that position to attack somewhere else. **Leadership: If no one voices a strategy during the buff phase, take initiative and speak up. Even something as simple as "IBGY first, plz" will help bring focus and help accomplish your initial objective. **Roles: Tell others what "Role" you will play in the battle. Let them know if you will be a Flag Carrier or a Healer, or if you will chase or slow down the opponents FC. It is best to do this at the start of the game (Buff Phase) while you are all together waiting for the game to start. ***Flag Carrier: Also know as a Runner or FC. Person who is responsible for actaully grabbing and carring the flag. It is better to have a Rogue or Druid carry the flag. They can run faster than other classes. ***Healer: Very important role. This person will try and stay out of harms way and heal the others fighting. If an opponent goes after your healer then target them first. Also, attack opponents healers rather than their fighting classes. ***Tanks: Person who takes the most amount of damage. They try to act as a shield to the other players. In PvP, tanks are not as useful as in regular game play. The reason is because Real Human Players are not affected by aggro. In game play tanks can force the computer to focus on them, but Real Human Players can attack whoever they want. **MiniMap: You can use the MiniMap to communicate with other players. **Keep it simple: Long statments like "7 ppl to Lumber Mill, 3 to stables and 5 to BS then go onto Farm but get the Gold Mine after that" are not productive. Often you only need to accomplish one objective at a time in a stepwise fashion. By stating one objective at a time, you will help to keep your team together and avoid spreading players too thin. Which leads to the next tip... *Groups of 1, 2, and 3 are fatal. By and large, you want to move as a steamrolling juggernaut of 5 or more people as you go through any battleground, preferably with a healer. Groups of 2 and even 3 are often easily picked off and should only be used for defense. Consult your map and strategy and move to where you are most helpful. Battlegrounds Alterac Valley The goal of AV is to kill the enemy general before your general is killed. What gives honor in AV? *Killing enemy General *Killing enemy Captain *Destroying enemy Towers *Capturing Graveyards *Killing Horde *Ending the game with intact friendly towers *Winning AV is usually considered a race to the other faction's general. 90% of the players will go on offense, immediately running across half the map. The remaining players are defense that fight a losing battle to delay the enemy from reaching the Alliance general. Since AV is a race to the other side, if you fail to "get out of the gate" at the moment the BG begins, you will get stuck behind an advancing wave of Horde. Your best option is to hunker down with the defense. If you are on defense, consider rushing ahead with 1 or 2 other defenders. The Horde will certainly kill you, but every precious second they take doing that could be essential for your team. The first action the Alliance needs to take is to capture the Iceblood Graveyard (IBGY). It is at a chokepoint about halfway down the map. There is a tower right next to it that should also be captured for very easy honor. There is a Horde captain (Galv) very close. Some players like to kill him for +62 honor, and others like to skip him to save time. Most arguments in AV are about killing Galv or skipping Galv. The only benefit of killing Galv is getting 62 honor. There are drawbacks to killing Galv. If you have a light force, he can take a few minues to kill. Also, any players that die before IBGY is actually captured will be forced to respawn with the Alliance defenders and will have an almost impossible time getting back on offense. This by far is the reason most Alliance teams lose. If in doubt, Iceblood and Snowfall Graveyards first, then move on to Galv. (Bonus hint: during buff phase, ask for a proper tank and healer to help with Galv to avoid unnecessary deaths.) After leaving IBGY the Alliance should capture Tower Point (TP). It is also very easy honor. Next, players will come to Frostwolf Garveyard (FWGY) right outside of Frostwolf Village. This should be captured. After entering Frostwolf Keep (FWK) there are 2 towers on each side of the entrance. There is also a graveyard beyond the entrance to Keep itself. This graveyard should be captured immediately. Once secured, the 2 towers should be captured. When the towers are destroyed they remove the Warmasters from guarding the Horde general. Even if the alliance decides to fight with the Warmasters, destroying the towers redeuces the ammount of honor the Horde get and also will give extra honor in case the Alliance offense fail to kill Drek and it turtles. When the BG Leader says "all in" it means it is time for all the offense to fight Drek'thar. Once you begind the fight, you should never mass fear or stand near the entrance. If Drek goes near the door he will leash and reset himself to 100% hp. I have seen a 1% Drek reset himself to 100% by players running around near the doorway. All DPS should focus on Drek, while healers should try to heal whoever is MT and other hapless DPS who are being pummeled by multiple whirlwinds. As of patch 2.3.0 capturing IBGY will make the horde players spawn at FWGY therefore creating yourself a giant group of hordes defending and thus putting yourself in a 30-40 min bg where instead it would take 10 min. Another issue that seems to be ignored is that one of the few choke points on the horde side of the map is in front of IBGY, but our offense usually can get through to start with. But no matter which way they approach IBGY, almost every time they will attack as a line in one direction in a choke point. Once the choke point starts to open up it's essential for the alliance to take as much space as possible, and to try and advanced past the bottleneck. This makes it slightly harder for them to AOE the alliance back. It is also a good thing to try once the horde offense has moved up and it will be virtually empty all the time. It also allows the alliance to defend the graveyard right away after the flag is taken. A similar problem is that when FWGY is attacked, people tend to attack in a straight line, when there is a huge opportunity to flank (or bypass) it. Don't forget that you can jump over the fence to avoid the doorway chokepoint, too. A good Defense is a Great Offense Offense Group 1-5 1. Hit Relief Hut 2. Take towers at FWK 3. Then take FWGY 4. Make sure Towers, and Relief hut are completely capped and get Drekk! Note: You want to make sure Relief hut captures before the fwgy or you will get a nice turtle effect where their defense spawns in a nicly protected area with some free offense all around if you don't have the FWK towers. Offense Group 7-8 1. Kill Galv 2. Take TP 3. Book it down to Drekk and hope you get in on it. Defense There is no defense unless you happen to be an unfotunate that died before the gy's cap. at this point it is your job to do anything you can to defend the towers, this means you had better be standing in the towers on the flag with a nice hunter who is smart enough to know that on defense the flare is one of the greatest offensive weapons out there... pesky rogues. This will allow for 10-15 minute AV's Getting roughly 400-600 honor depending on how well you personally do. The one thing to note is that you make sure to allow the towers and the relief hut to completely cap before you even touch drekk. I have won with this strategy around 80-90% of the time, unless the horde happen to have a great defence on RH and you do not have the requisite amount of people on offense. The main reason for this strategy is that even when the horde zerg their timers are going to be 12+ seconds longer than the alliance timers so you will have the upper hand on drekk, and with group 2 coming in as soon as they can you can keep the fight going indefinately easily making sure drekk does not reset. Note: Beware of priests in Drekks tower they like to sit right around the corner and fear you into drekk, Yes its cheap, but it is also VERY effective if you are peeking in before the relief hut is completely capped An uncommon and slightly unorthodox approach to AV First of all I want to note that this theory comes from the 2.3.2 version of AV, and chances are it will not be relevant for patch 2.4. Most of the strategy written above also applies to this approach, but the priorities and theory behind it different as all successful generals in battles do; you must make your enemy attacks work against them. First of all, it's common knowledge that virtually all Horde approaches to AV involve a zerg to our graveyard and then slowly work their way through the alliances towers/GY's etc. They usually have low levels of defense, no more than 8-10 ever, and even when the alliance are on the offense, they very rarely come back to help; all they think is zerg zerg zerg zerg zerg, even if 10 ppl are next to them. The big problem with most of our offenses is that we always target the first graveyard on their side (IBGY), but this theory involves almost the entire offense (of about 30) to push all the way to their second graveyard (FWGY). Snowfall is always beneficial and if one or two decide to try and take this, well and good; it will help the people who die during the first push to catch up. FWGY is always undefended to begin with and with a good number of players it should be defendable against 10 horde (although as mentioned elsewhere, you must beware flanking because it's a fairly open area.) This graveyard becomes the offense's base of operations and must never be lost, at least until the final graveyard has been taken, and at that point THAT graveyard must be protected. In fact, the offense group should dedicate enough players to defend the graveyard from the defense (who will spawn at IBGY), allowing the rest of the offense to pick things off relatively easily (at least in theory.) Also, since FWGY cannot be lost, getting IBT should not be a priority and TP should only be done if the offense is confident it can pull it off. It is probably best not to take IBGY should not be taken until the horde offense has obtained at least one of our graveyards. Once this is done however, the alliance can certainly take out the towers nearby, but Galv should be left imo because he takes up time that the alliance does not have unless the alliance are dominating. A critical thing is to keep the Horde's spawns sandwiched between the two alliance spawns, as it makes a push to Drek'thar far more possible possible. NO ONE is to fight on the middle field, ever. NO ONE fights on the choke points of IBGY, apart from a few to divert their attention enough for the offense group to setup to defend their attack on FWGY. The defense of this strategy doesn't change much, in fact it may be beneficial to surrender Stonehearth (or Snowfall, depending on who has that) so that the offense cannot come back and recover their graveyard. However, once they do have a graveyard in front of IBGY, however, the defense must defend and slow (you cannot stop them with their numbers) them down as much as possible. The defenders are the people who win these games if our offense is sufficient, even though they die continually. Fortunately the Alliance has more chokepoints, and provided they stay together, be weary of the flank via the mountains and valley to the Stormpike GY, and if appropriate the towers can be recovered, their zerg should be held up enough for our offense to take hold of the graveyard and set up our victory. This is arguably a more risky approach, but considering the poor success rate of most approaches, this approach can easily catch the horde off-guard, and that advantage must not be surrendered. It's risky because if the defense succeeds at preventing the offense from getting a graveyard, but they obtain stormhearth GY, say hello to Mr Turtle.) As mentioned elsewhere, IBGY isn't the prefered graveyard because they will spawn to FWGY and the defense can slow us far more. In the end there are two defense groups, a bigger one slowing their zerg and another defending the offense GY; the rest gets a break since the horde will be in low numbers, and we can succeed with what we often fail to do: win. Good luck everyone. We have to shock and awe them but avoid stopping (or spamming unless it will be successful) the infamous chokepoint in front of IBGY. Eye of the Storm EotS is part capture the flag and part king of the hill. There are 4 towers that capture based on proximity and a flag in the middle that can be captured for points. More flag points are earned for each tower the Alliance controls. The key to EotS is not the flag, it's good tower control. Controlling 3 towers is ideal for an easy win, but it takes work. Many players get so focused on capturing the flag they fail to defend the towers, leading to the very common Horde 3-4 cap. I cannot stress how important the towers are. Even a lightly defended tower will have 2 players to prevent a sneaky Horde cap. A good initial strategy is to secure the Mage Tower and Draenai Ruins, have two or three people rush the flag (middle) to distract horde, and then call on at least 5 people to follow you to Blood Elf Tower or Fel Reaver Ruins. Even without the flag, holding 3 towers even for a short time can give you an insurmountable lead and thus the game. Once you get 3 towers secured, everyone should be on defense, shifting players to towers that the Horde are assaulting. Grabbing the flag at this point is nice, but should NOT be a focus. One of the most common mistakes I see when the Alliance has a 3-cap is every player rushing the middle for the flag thinking the towers are safe. The horde usually counter attack and retake 2 towers leading to a reverse 3-cap. [Alternate and more effective strategy, similar as above. Secure three towers, however do NOT sit on defense. This is a common mistake by Alliance across all Battlegroups. When you have secured 3 towers, keep the pressure on the opposing team. This will keep them bottlenecked to one graveyard. Do not forego defense alltogether, only three players are needed to prevent stealth caps. Twelve players can keep a larger opposing force bottlenecked for quite some time. Same holds true with Arathi Basin, it is entirely too difficult to react to an opposing force, keep the pressure on and dictate the course of the battle. You want the enemy on his heels reacting to you, not the other way around. --Battlegroup, Vengeance] To reiterate: the flag is almost meaningless if you hold 3 or more towers, even for a minute or so. It is by far better to patrol back and forth between the towers you own, and if you are lucky and cap 3 towers, you may abandon defense to rush the horde's last tower. This is akin to graveyard camping as all dead horde will rez at their last tower. If the Alliance can fight the Horde back to the point they 4-cap and this usually results in a win for the team that 4-caps. Capturing the flag with 4 towers is worth 500 points, and should be the only time the team is really going for a capture as the payoff is so huge. Arathi Basin Arathi Basin is a map with 5 flag points that give points based on how many flags each faction controls. Capturing more flags results in faster points for the controlling team. Owning all 5 flags will result in massive points and a usualy win for the 5-capping team if they can hold for a minute or two. The strategy to use in AB is very similar to EotS. You always want to own 3 or more of the 5 flags. While flags are switching sides, they are neutral. This is when they are vulnerable because defenders will not respawn there. A good strategy is for the Alliance to capture the Blacksmith (BS) early, as the Horde usually do not expect the Alliance to go for the middle. The BS is very important because its graveyard allows Alliance to reach almost every other flag quickly. Once captured, all flags need at least 2-3 defenders to thwart any Horde attack. A common mistake in most ABs is that the Alliance tends to forget the Stables, letting the Horde quickly capture it, which causes the Alliance to freak out, and zerg the Stables for 10 min hopelessly when they should be focused on capping everything else. If a flag is well defended, that means there is another flag with little defense. It is critical that the Alliance communicates and alerts the team about flags with 1-2 hordes. Another common strategy is to "squeeze" a flag from both sides as long as there is no Horde threat nearby. The key to this is getting back on Defense quickly. If you gather too many Alliance in one spot the Horde will quickly move to the other flags and capture. Because the map is rather large, travelling alone is certain death. The same goes for the Horde. If you see a solo Horde, gank him. Rotating Defense and Offense: The most efficient type of defense or offense on this map is what would be called a rotating Defense or offense basically if you do not control the blacksmith, but have a handle on any three of the outer flags then you would simply re-enforce or attack by rotating people from the side with the least resistance to the side with the most resistance. E.X.> you control stables, gold mine, and lumber mill. Gold mine is being attacked, send 1 from stables to gold mine, and 1 from lumber mill to stables, so in effect you are rotating your defenses by 1, this can be done with as many or few people as needed, if they happen to zerg one of your outer defenses immediately pull off of that point and rotate 1 full flag in the opposite direction. This would put you on offense but its ok, the idea is not to keep 3 flags fully capped, but to have 2 flags capped with 2 in transition as often as possible. The ONLY time you should be trying to take a horde controlled flag is when you rotate to a fully offensive position. Other than that you should only be trying to hold the three flags you have. Warsong Gulch I'll admit it; I hate WSG. There is something about WSG that is so demoralizing, so frustrating that I can barely bring myself to do it. To make it worse, the honor for losing is probably the lowest honor of any BG. Other than the marks, its pretty pointless as the Horde seem to win WSG easily. WSG is a traditional capture the flag, with 2 bases separated by a short battlefield. It is rather wide, but most action takes place in the middle. It appears that the best tactic is to simply travel across the map in a group of 10, let a few players go in to cap the flag, and have the entire group shield the flag runner as he runs back to the friendly base. If the enemy captures your flag you need to kill him before he returns to the Horde base and hides, as it is hard to get inside. Usually, a well played team will have little trouble killing off enemies as they spawn or attempt to run out of the base with the flag. The game basicaly comes down to a giant melee in the middle, usually right near the Alliance graveyard, while fast druids and rogues capture the flag while the Alliance helplessly zergs the middle. The key to WSG is to travel in a huge group and focus fire any Horde you can, and keep their numbers in the Graveyard, not on the field. Once a team gets momentum in the middle, it's over. Telsiree's tips to topple the tortuous trial known as WSG "WSG is a beast. It is a beast you must come to observe, study, and eventually annhiliate." Keys to winning: *Buff your heart out. Kings, Stamina, healthstones, imp, commanding shout. Whoever gets that flag will need it. *Surprise 'em. Defense wins championships. More than any other battleground, WSG rewards defense and focused kills. Defenders with pets, elementals, and demons are a plus as they can create mass confusion allowing you to zero in on the flag carrier. *The first flag. This is it. This usually makes or breaks the rest of the battle. The most common strategy leaves 2 or 3 on defense to slow the initial Horde assault, while the rest grab the flag. The resulting melee in the middle should be focused on CC of Horde and killing/slowing the flag carrier and his healers. Don't hesitate to blow a cooldown if you think it can help you get that flag carrier. The first flag is that important. If you cap that first flag, your chances of winning are doubled, and if you get 2 flags to 0, it's tripled. *Move as a UNIT around the flag carrier. That's your lifeline. The best results I see come from the flag carrier participating in the fight rather than running; all the heals are focused on you anyway, so you might as well give the Horde some pain as well. *Horde are so predictible. I'm serious. The Horde usually sleepwalk through WSG since they win so often, and it's burned into their very souls. They ride up the hill of the Alliance base, and almost always exit through the ramp. You know where they're going, so prepare a little love fest for the Horde when they come out into daylight. *What if the flag carriers both turtle? If you can make yourself untrackable, do it. Aside from that, it's now a game of cat and mouse. Look to the roof(s) and keep moving as a unit, both offensively and defensively, and adjust as needed. Basically, the flag carrier will want to stay near or in their base so they can quickly cap the flag, so that's where you should look first. *Join a premade. Really, it's not that hard. Jelinda's tips of how to distribute roles in WSG: Distribution of Roles in Warsong Gulch Final thoughts I hope you found some of this helpful. It's not meant to be in-depth, just a basic outline of solid strategies for each BG. Most BGs can be won if the golden rules are followed. Good luck out there, and if you happen to be on the Nightfall battlegroup, I'll be on the lookout for AFK Heroes! I know where you hide! -- Ehrion - Undermine - 70 Warrior Category:Alliance Category:Battlegrounds Category:PvP